Entertainment

Rotten Tomatoes Makes Your Facebook Friends Movie Critics

Flixster-owned movie review site Rotten Tomatoes is now using Facebook's Instant Personalization features to tailor site content for each visitor upon arrival.

As a select Facebook partner, Rotten Tomatoes is now able to instantaneously greet logged-in Facebook members with featured content personalized by the visitor's movie preferences, and the public Facebook behaviors of themselves and their friends.

The new personalization features can be seen in the "Movies Your Friends Like," "Friends Activity" and "Movies Recommended For You" sections. Facebook members can also share what movies they want to see back with Facebook without having to log in to Rotten Tomatoes or go through the process of linking the two accounts.

"Flixster users have contributed more than 2.5 billion movie ratings across all of our applications, and through our partnership with Facebook we’ll help users sift through all of those ratings and instantly find the ones from people who matter the most to them," says Flixster CEO and Co-founder Joe Greenstein.

Altogether, the new Rotten Tomatoes experience taps into Facebook and Flixster activity for a rich experience that one-ups the original purpose of exposing users to reviews and ratings from movie critics. When it comes to movies, a friend's two thumbs up can mean more than a movie critic's review. The new Rotten Tomatoes lets users take both factors into consideration.

When Instant Personalization first launched, both Pandora and Yelp were featured partners that offered an experience more acutely aware of Facebook friend activity. The personalization features were celebrated by some and berated by others who felt their privacy was at risk.

Facebook released simplified privacy controls to combat concerns and make it easier for Facebook members to opt out of Instant Personalization. Instant Personalization remains opt-in by default — meaning you have to explicitly opt out if you do not want your public Facebook activities to be shared with Facebook partner sites including Rotten Tomatoes.

If you're of the ilk who can appreciate how Facebook friends' Likes and movie reviews can help enhance your movie discovery process, however, then you'll certainly appreciate the Facebook-tailored Rotten Tomatoes experience.

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